After beginning his career working in an informalist mode, followed by a brief period of lyrical figuration, Paternosto first created artworks based on Geometric Abstraction in the early 1960s. By the end of this decade, his formal and theoretical explorations led the artist to push beyond the very boundaries of the medium of painting. Leaving the surface of the canvas blank, Paternosto shifted the emphasis of his artworks to their outer edges, converting his paintings into objects, and rebelling against the inherited tradition of only viewing paintings frontally. Since this breakthrough, he has remained on the vanguard of abstraction in both New York, where he lived for over four decades, and Latin America.

In addition to his career as a painter, Paternosto has studied Pre-Columbian art with academic rigor. This expertise has not only influenced his artistic practices, but has also led him to assume scholarly and curatorial roles, including the international exhibition, Abstraction: The Amerindian Paradigm. In 2005, the artist moved to Segovia, Spain, where, just a year prior, a major retrospective of his work had been on view at the Esteban Vicente Museum of Contemporary Art. Paintings by Paternosto are found in various prestigious collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; and the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany, amongst others.

This beautifully designed and printed catalogue of essays, large color plates, and illustrated chronology explores Paternosto's artistic contributions, influences and achievements over the last 4 decades.

Challenging the notion that abstraction is a development of the modern West, Paternosto reveals its deep roots as an indigenous American tradition and shows how that tradition reverberates in the work of twentieth-century artists... In this major, paradigm-shifting book... César Paternosto offers the first comprehensive analysis of ancient Andean art - textiles, pottery, stone sculpture, and the famous lines in the Nazca desert - into one coherent whole...

Catalogue of the 1998-99 gallery exhibition with a major essay by the artist and historian César Paternosto and the essay: Three Andean Tunics – Color and Geometry as Metaphor by Vanessa Drake & Andres Moraga. As reviewed by Holland Cotter in the New York Times, "... the show traces a line, or rather several lines, between pre-Columbian art and 20th-century American modernism, with some eye-opening results."